Anticipated Releases: January-March 2026
- The Fiction Fox
- Nov 1
- 16 min read
January Releases
Crux by Gabriel Tallent
Genre: Literary Fiction Expected release date: January 20th 2026 Synopsis:
Dan and Tamma are two Californian teenagers growing up dirt poor in the shadows of the Joshua Tree National Park, one of the world’s great rock climbing meccas. Their mothers had once been teenage waitresses and best friends until their paths diverged. Now Dan’s mother spends her days locked in her room, her dreams squandered and all her hopes pinned on getting her precociously clever son out of town and away to university.Tamma’s mother holds no such ambition for her mouthy, queer, truant-playing, snaggle-toothed daughter, who everyone but Dan believes to be a troublemaker and no-hoper. But Tamma and Dan are fuelled by dreams of becoming legendary rock climbers, of devoting their lives to summiting the most challenging climbs and defying all the expectations, both good and bad, that others have for them.Climbing at sun-up, on cliff faces that test their bodies to the limit, is where their friendship is forged. It’s also the one thing that gives them hope. But as their final year of high school unfolds and their climbs become ever more dangerous, and their home lives ever more extreme, it’s inevitable that something is going to snap...
Humboldt Cut by Allison Mick
Genre: Horror
Expected release date: January 27th 2026
Synopsis:
Jasmine Bay is a nurse for an Oakland mental health facility, battling her own demons, caught in a spiral of suicidal despair. Estranged from her brother James and his wife Tilly, who was once her best friend, Jas has chosen self-isolation to protect herself—even if it means denying herself a hopeful future with co-worker and potential love interest Henry Lewis. When her godmother dies, Jas returns to Redceder for the funeral, a logging town where her grandfather William Whipple made a living deforesting the countryside, ripping and raping apart nature’s very foundations for corporate profits. As trees fell to axes and chainsaws, so did dozens of lumberjacks, falling prey to the dangers of their job—and to the ecoterrorism of Jas’s grandfather who was lynched for his crimes.And buried in the haunted woods are even more dark secrets perpetrated by Jas’s family. Unnatural acts giving birth to entities made of human flesh and petrified bark, seeking to avenge the devastation that ravaged their land. It is an inheritance that threatens to consume the remnants of Jas’s family, and her very sanity. . .
Celebrated comedy writer Allison Mick’s Humboldt Cut exposes the traumatic costs of environmental destruction in an energetic, darkly humorous horror adventure that combines the botanical terrors of VanderMeer’s Annihilation and the psychological horror of The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones with a dash of Jordan Peele.
On Sundays She Picked Flowers by Yah Yah Scholfield
Genre: Horror novella
Expected release date: January 27th 2026
Synopsis: On Sundays She Picks Flowers is about a woman named Judith who finally escapes her mother to countryside of Georgia. There she makes a home for herself in a cottage given to her by a relatively kind innkeeper. And it’s there she begins her Sunday routine. And it’s there she learns of the beings in the woods. And it’s also there she meets Nemoira, the woman who changes her life in ways Judith never even thought of. This novel is the exploration of transformation, of metamorphosis, closure, retribution, nature, and healing. In this southern gothic tale, you will see Judith become undone, redone, and become in incredible ways that is human and more than human. It’s a rollercoaster of emotion, dealings of familial trauma, love, and mystery.
Vigil by George Saunders
Genre: Literary novella
Expected release date: January 27th 2026
Synopsis:
Not for the first time, Jill “Doll” Blaine finds herself hurtling toward earth, reconstituting as she falls, right down to her favorite black pumps. She plummets towards her newest charge, yet another soul she must usher into the afterlife, and lands headfirst in the circular drive of his ornate mansion.She has performed this sacred duty three hundred and forty-three times since her own death. Her charges, as a rule, have been greatly comforted in their final moments. But this charge, she soon discovers, isn’t like the The powerful K.J. Boone will not be consoled, because he has nothing to regret. He lived a big, bold life, and the world is better for it. Isn’t it? Vigil transports us, careening, through the wild final evening of an epic, complicated life. Crowds of people and animals—worldly and otherworldly, alive and dead—arrive, clamoring for a reckoning. Birds swarm the dying man’s room, a black calf grazes on the loveseat, a man from a distant drought-ravaged village materializes, two oil-business cronies from decades past show up with chilling plans for Boone’s post-death future. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/238873074-vigil
February Releases
The Forest at the Edge of Time by Jasmine Kirkbride
Genre: Sci-fi
Expected release date: February 3rd 2026
Synopsis:
Recruited by the mysterious Project Kairos to change history and save the future from ecological disaster, Echo and Hazel are transported through time to opposite worlds. Echo works as a healer’s assistant in Ancient Athens, embroiled in dangerous politics and wild philosophy. Hazel is the last human alive, in a laboratory on a polluted island with nothing but tiny robots and an untrustworthy AI for company.Both women suffer from amnesia but when they fall asleep, their consciousnesses transcend time and they meet in their dreams. Together, they start to uncover their past – but soon discover the past threatens humanity’s survival.
Mass Mothering by Sarah Bruni
Genre: Literary Fiction
Expected release date: February 3rd 2026
Synopsis:
A. is an amateur translator, living alone in an unforgiving, late-capitalist metropolis. Adrift and burdened by debt following a medical trauma, she makes rent caring for a young boy who is not and could never be her own. Her nights are spent on the dance floor, chasing spontaneous connection. There, she encounters N., who shares her numbed state and sometimes her bed.Among N.’s meager possessions, A. comes across a slim book about an unnamed foreign town of disappearing boys. The book, Field Notes, documents the stories of a community of mothers who assemble to mourn their missing sons together. A. is transfixed by this collective chorus of primal grief, the mothers’ preternatural strength, and their intuitive care for each other. When a near-assault stuns A. out of her inertia, she takes off for the city where Field Notes was written in search of its author and the end of his story. But A.’s digging leads her instead to the traces of a murdered poet, a mysterious woman whose legacy will intersect unexpectedly and pivotally with A.’s own life.
Eradication by Jonathan Miles
Genre: Literary Fiction
Expected release date: February 5th 2026
Synopsis:
Reeling from tragedy, a former jazz musician-turned-schoolteacher named Adi answers a job listing advertising a chance to save the world. The to spend five weeks alone on the tiny, isolated Pacific Island of Santa Flora and reckon with its invasive population of goats that's sent the ecological balance severely out of whack, and in doing so preserve the countless bird and plant species from certain extinction.What follows, however, is anything but balanced. The threats to the once-Edenic island, Adi soon learns, aren't exactly what his employers said they were - and, complicating things further, he discovers he's not alone on the island. Fearful for his own life, and for the fate of the island's, Adi spends his sun-drenched days rooting out the true threat to Santa Flora, and, by extension, to the world it occupies - and the desperate steps he must take to eradicate it.
Strange Animals by Jarod K. Anderson
Genre: Fantasy
Expected release date: February 10th 2026
Synopsis: An ordinary man discovers a hidden world of wondrous supernatural creatures—and an unexpected home—in this enchanting contemporary fantasy debut.
After a series of inexplicable encounters upends his life, Green finds himself alone and terrified in the Appalachian mountains, full of questions about the transformation he’s undergoing and the impossible creatures he’s starting to see.When he meets a hermit named Valentina, he realizes that something more than chance has brought him to her door. For she has devoted centuries to researching the hidden world of cryptids that Green is only now beginning to perceive. As Green begins his studies beneath her watchful eye, he comes face to face with time-stopping giant moths, cyclops squirrels, and doorways to elsewhere. Along the way come clues about his own nature and the powerful beings who led him here—and, most wondrous of all, a sense of fulfillment like nothing he’s felt before. But Green’s new happiness promises to be short-lived, because alongside these marvels lurks a deadly threat to this place he’s already come to love.
Nowhere Burning by Catriona Ward
Genre: Horror
Expected release date: February 19th 2026
Synopsis:
High in the mountains sits Nowhere, a verdant valley surrounded by walls of rock. People have lived at Nowhere for centuries, though never for long, and rarely happily. Its last owner was its most famous: movie star Leaf Winham, who built Nowhere House as his refuge, to hide from his fame - and to hide his crimes. Only when Nowhere House went up in flames were the graves discovered, the last resting places of young men who would never go home.Years later, it is rumoured that Nowhere is now a refuge for runaway children, a place where adults cannot enter. Drawn by this promise, fourteen-year-old Riley pulls her brother Oliver from his bed in the middle of the night, hoping to find a new family. But there is darkness in the ruins of Nowhere House, something which asks a terrible price for sanctuary...
The Iron Garden Sutra by A.D. Sui
Genre: Sci-fi
Expected release date: February 24th 2026
Synopsis:
A monk joins a science team in exploring a long-lost spaceship, uncovering its dark and disturbing history—and encountering something beyond human understanding—in this thought-provoking, metaphysical science fiction novel. Vessel Iris has devoted himself to the Starlit Order, performing funeral rites for the dead across the galaxy and guiding souls back into the Infinite Light. Despite the comfort he wants to believe he brings to the dead, his relationships with his fellow Vessels are distant at best, leaving him reliant on his AI construct for companionship.The spaceship Counsel of Nicaea has been lost for more than a thousand years. A relic of Earth’s dying past, humanity took the ship to the stars on a multi-generation journey to find another habitable planet yet never reached its destination. Its sudden appearance has attracted a team of academics eager to investigate its archeological history. And Iris has been assigned to bring peace to the crew’s long departed souls.Carpeted in moss and intertwined with vines, Nicaea is more forest than ship. But the ship's plant life isn’t the only sentience to have survived in the past millennia. Something onboard is stalking the explorers one by one. And Iris with his AI construct may be their only hope for survival. . .
The Misheard World by Aliya Whiteley
Genre: Sci-fi
Expected release date: February 24th 2026
Synopsis: Elize Janview is a soldier, one of the few survivors of an unimaginably terrible weapon, which ended the long détente between the North and the South and plunged them back into all-out war. She enlisted with a dream of finding those responsible, of somehow getting revenge for the deaths of everyone she knew, but was posted to guard the prison at Crag, the fortress of the South, which has never fallen to the enemy.Janview’s life is transformed when a rough wooden box is delivered to Crag, holding the performer and spy Marius Mondegreen, agent of the North: the Misheard Word, who can read minds, breathe fire, and make objects appear and disappear. Janview is to witness Mondegreen’s interrogation by his captor, the beautiful and cruel Allynx Syld, who promises the end of the war. As recorder – and by degrees participant – in the interrogation, Janview comes to question everything she knew about the war, and the very world she lives in…
March Releases
Piper at the Gates of Dusk by Patrick Ness
Genre: Sci-fi
Expected release date: March 1st 2026
Synopsis: “I dream of Noise,” says our young narrator. But that should be impossible. The Noise was “cured” years ago, though some would argue “cure” is entirely the wrong word for the cost it extracted. But our narrator isn’t the only one hearing it in his sleep; so are all of his friends and maybe every young person on New World.Something is coming. From an inconceivable interstellar distance away, something is coming that is about to commit an unspeakable crime. Who can stop them? What chance does our narrator and his friends have against an enemy so vast?Fortunately, his family knows something about saving the world against impossible odds.His parents are named Todd and Viola.
The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts - Kim Fu
Genre: Literary Fiction
Expected release date: March 3rd 2026
Synopsis:
In the aftermath of her mother's death, Eleanor is unmoored. For years, her mother orchestrated every detail of her life—from meals, to laundry, to finances—as Eleanor focused on her career as an online therapist. Left to navigate the world on her own, Eleanor clings to her mother’s final directive: use her inheritance to buy a house.
Desperate to obey her mother one last time, Eleanor impulsively buys a model home in a valley-turned-construction site, a picturesque development steeped in a shadowy history. It feels like a fresh start, until the rain comes—an endless, torrential downpour. As water seeps in through the house’s cracks, the line between what is real and what is not begins to blur. Haunted by the stories of her clients, a stream of workmen and bureaucrats she can’t trust, and visions of ghosts from her past and present, Eleanor’s reality unravels, and she is forced to reckon with the secrets she’s buried and the choices she’s made.
Right as Rain by Tashie Bhuiyan
Genre: Young Adult-contemporary, Magical Realism
Expected release date: March 10th 2026
Synopsis: Recent high-school graduate Megh Rashid has plans to escape to the other side of the country for college and leave behind the stormy household she’s been trapped in for years. But things are complicated when she gets struck by lightning right before the start of a prestigious summer internship that’s key to her getting accepted to her dream university, and she wakes up to a storm cloud that follows her everywhere, seemingly attuned to her every emotion.Megh’s struggles with depression, fear of leaving her home and loved ones, and uncertainty about her future cause the cloud to act up, creating rainstorms that dampen her spirits and her hopes of making an impact at her internship. With the help of fellow intern Lev Osman, a boy whose warmth makes her feel less alone, Megh has to find a way to control her feelings and decide what she’s willing to sacrifice in order to secure her desired future.
The Library of Traumatic Memory by Neil Jordan
Genre: Fantasy
Expected release date: March 16th 2026
Synopsis:
In a windswept corner of a forgotten peninsula, love and loss echo through the halls of a mansion built on secrets. Here memory is currency of the future, and the past refuses to stay buried.
In the year 2084, Christian Cartwright, a quiet librarian at the enigmatic Huxley Institute, spends his days archiving the world’s most painful memories in the Library of Traumatic Memory. But when his lover Isolde dies in a mysterious car crash, Christian secretly resurrects her as a digital consciousness — an act of grief, obsession, and defiance.
As Christian navigates a world where memories can be edited, dreams harvested, and the dead made to speak, he uncovers a deeper conspiracy buried in the Institute’s foundations — one that stretches back centuries to his 18th-century ancestor Montagu Cartwright, the architect of the Huxley Mansion.
Montagu’s obsidian mirror and copper model may hold the key to a reality where architecture shapes fate and time loops back on itself.
Blending gothic mystery, speculative science, and philosophical depth, The Library of Traumatic Memory is a haunting meditation on love, loss, and the ethics of memory.
Westward Women by Alice Martin
Genre: Fiction, Dystopia
Expected release date: March 12th 2026
Synopsis:
It starts with an itch. In 1970s America, in homes across the country, women ages eighteen to thirty-five begin to slow down.Tired. Blank. Restless.Drawn to the Pacific Ocean like it's calling them home, they abandon their lives -- jobs, families, their very selves. And once they reach the West, they vanish forever. At the center of the story are three young women caught in the pull of something unstoppable.Aimee follows the trail of her missing best friend to a man called the Piper -- known for leading infected women West. Teenie, afflicted and unraveling, clings to a single memory as she looks out the window of the Piper's van. And Eve, a former journalist, is chasing the story that might just consume her...
Under Water by Tara Menon
Genre: Literary Fiction
Expected release date: March 17th 2026
Synopsis:
After Marissa loses her mother at five, the most intimate relationship of her life begins. Her marine biologist father, determined to channel his grief into completing his wife’s research, whisks her across the globe to Thailand. There she meets Arielle, and a fairytale friendship takes hold. During the week, the girls live at the resort owned by Arielle’s parents; on the weekends they join the tight-knit community of researchers on a nearby island. Together the girls discover the fragile wonders of its reefs, forests, and beaches. Together they learn to dive into the deep, holding their breath for minutes at a time, as effortlessly synchronized as the manta rays they come to know by name. Together they learn to swim their way out of danger. But then comes a wave Arielle can’t outpace, leaving Marissa gutted with loss.
Years later, Marissa is back in New York, adrift and haunted by the memory of her friend. Over the course of two fateful days, as another cataclysm approaches the city and the past comes flooding back, she discovers how to sustain herself in a precarious world.
Crawlspace by Adam Christopher
Genre: Sci-fi horror
Expected release date: March 17th 2026
Synopsis:
Mission Lead Olivia O’Connor and her team from the Artemis Corporation, along with their military liaison, are in the final preparations for a undertaking that will alter the course of human the first faster than light test flight that finally opening up the expanse of the universe.But their journey between dimensions is one they never trained for. Strange voices in the corridors. Long lost faces not forgotten. Strange symbols carved into the hull. And gathering outside the ship, ancient forces beyond reckoning. The crew will need all their skills to survive and uncover the twisted truth behind their mission.
Wolf Worm by T. Kingfisher
Genre: horror
Expected release date: March 24th 2026
Synopsis:
The year is 1899 and Sonia Wilson is a scientific illustrator without work, prospects, or hope. When the reclusive Dr. Halder offers her a position illustrating his vast collection of insects, Sonia jumps at the chance to move to his North Carolina manor house and put her talents to use. But soon enough she finds that there are darker things at work than the Carolina woods. What happened to her predecessor, Halder’s wife? Why are animals acting so strangely, and what is behind the peculiar local whispers about “blood thiefs?” With the aid of the housekeeper and a local healer, Sonia discovers that Halder’s entomological studies have taken him down a dark road full of parasitic maggots that burrow into human flesh, and that his monstrous experiments may grow to encompass his newest illustrator as well.
Celestial Lights by Cecile Pin
Genre: Sci-fi, Speculative Fiction
Expected release date: March 24th 2026
Synopsis:
January 28, 1986: Soon after launch, the Challenger shuttle falls out of the sky and into the sea. At the same time, Oliver Ines is born. Celestial Lights is his story.
Ollie spends his childhood in an English village where his bedroom is covered in glow-in-the-dark wallpaper bearing the planets and stars. Decades later, he has become one of the most renowned astronauts of his time. When an enterprising billionaire taps him to lead a landmark mission to the distant moon Europa, Ollie makes a choice that will send his whole world spinning.
As the mission advances deeper into unchartered territory, Ollie finds himself retreating into the past: his university days in London and years in the navy, relationships found and lost, becoming a husband and father. But will the world he remembers still be waiting for him when he returns?Cecile Pin’s novel is a portrait of a complicated man whose unparalleled understanding of the universe doesn’t always translate into stellar relationships on Earth.
A breathtaking tale of memory, personal choices, and the relationships that define us, Celestial Lights is an unforgettable story of fate, love, and sacrifice that questions what we owe ourselves and our loved ones when our ambitions and loyalties collide.
The Renovation by Kenna Orhan
Genre: literary ficton
Expected release date: March 26th 2026
Synopsis:
Dilara’s father is disappearing. His memories are collapsing, dementia stealing a little more of him each day. She has persuaded him to move in with her, hiring builders to adapt her apartment to his new needs, but when the renovation is complete she discovers a big problem: instead of a new en-suite bathroom, the builders have installed a Turkish prison cell.
At first she is outraged. There has surely been some mistake. Dilara’s family are exiles – they left Turkey many years ago and have never been back. The last thing she wants is a piece of her estranged homeland appearing uninvited in her new home.
But as the weeks pass, her indignation gradually gives way to curiosity. Beyond the cell door, she glimpses Turkish guards going about their work. Through the cell walls, she hears Turkish prisoners murmuring, rustling, crying out in their sleep. And in the strange, impossible air of the cell itself, she smells the sesame scent of freshly baked simit, she tastes the fine dust of the Anatolian steppe on her tongue.
Even as she struggles to care for her father, to keep the family finances afloat and stop the wheels coming off her marriage, Dilara is drawn back again and again to the mysterious prison cell, and through it to a city that once belonged to her – to the salt wind off the Marmara, the sky full of gulls and domes and minarets – drawn inexorably back to Istanbul.
The Geomagician by Jennifer Mandula
Genre: Historical fantasy
Expected release date: March 31st 2026
Synopsis:
Mary Anning wants to be a geomagician—a paleontologist who uses fossils to wield magic—but since the Geomagical Society of London refuses to admit women, she’s stuck selling her discoveries to tourists instead. When an ancient egg hatches in her hands, revealing a loveable baby pterodactyl Mary names Ajax, she knows this is the kind of scientific find that could make her career—if she’s strategic.Mary contacts the Society about her discovery, and they demand to take possession of Ajax. Their emissary is none other than Henry Stanton, a distinguished (and infuriatingly handsome) scholar... and the man who once broke Mary's heart.Henry claims he believes in the brilliant Mary, and that he only wants to help her obtain the respect she deserves. She knows she can't trust her fellow scholars, who want to discredit her and claim Ajax for their own—but can she even trust Henry, who seems intent on winning Mary back?Now Mary has a new mystery to solve that's buried deeper than any dinosaur She must uncover the secrets behind the Society and the truth about Henry. As her conscience begins to chafe against her ambition, Mary must decide what lengths she’s willing to go to finally belong—and what her heart really wants.
Ruins by Lily Brooks Dalton
Genre: Sci-fi/Speculative
Expected release date: March 31st 2026
Synopsis:
Professor Ember Agni is a rising star in archeology, trying to balance an unfulfilling career in academia and a crumbling marriage, all while pursuing her true unearthing a lost empire that no one else believes existed. Just as she’s about to give up on the ambitious expedition she spent a decade trying to fund, a message arrives from overseas. A former student claims to have found something extraordinary—an artifact that hints at the forgotten world lying beneath history’s tidy surface.With vindication finally within reach, Ember risks everything for the sake of discovery and undertakes an odyssey that will either make her name or ruin her. Driven by unwavering faith in her vision of the past, she challenges the limits of her nation, her colleagues, and herself in order to exhume the missing pieces of how humanity began. But as she journeys deep into an untouched wilderness, in dogged pursuit of a dead civilization, she collides with the wreckage of her own life. On the brink of either discovery or destruction, Ember must choose who she wants to be, and to what kind of world she wants to belong.
